I think Apple is still deciding what this number should be and it is changing between betas. My hope is that at least a few times an hour should be possible.

Yes, I am seeing this a lot, both with my own widgets and ones provided by Apple.

I don't work at Apple so my word isn't canonical, but my instinct is that the fact that onAppear is working is a bug. The widgets are totally static, you should imagine that they are generating a still image which is shown the user at the system's discretion. Much like the app switcher screens, or launch screens. They can't take any action on being shown or hidden, or under any other circumstance.

Just to clarify, there is no way to pass formatting options into the style parameter right?

In beta 1 it seemed like widgets refreshed from the timeline every few seconds. Since beta 2 it seems to be much less frequent, like maybe once an hour. I am fine with not updating every second, but once a minute seems quite reasonable given the low cost of the widget views. I think this will be a problem for apps which want to show timely glanceable information (for example the system clocks widget does not update every minute). I will raise a feedback.

Xcode 12 is required for developing iOS 14 style widgets. You can run it along side Xcode 11 though.

I would recommend using the viewContext for everything by default. If you hit a real life scenario where this is causing an issue I would investigate how to solve that issue at that point, but it’s better to avoid complexity until you need it. (To be clear I think this is a good question and this is not an intuitive answer. I think the contexts could be better labelled as “default” and “expert” or something like that)

this is a bug right? because "Supports Running Without iOS App Installation" should not mean "cannot have ios app installed"? And does not on the real device, only on simulator?